The finance minister is really mincing no words. He is on American soil and has openly said the recent H-1B visa fee hike is discriminatory in nature. “India’s concern over the hike in the H-1B and L1 visa fee, which is discriminatory and in effect is largely targeted at Indian IT companies,” he said. What do you make of the statement?

I think what the Finance Minister has stated is the obvious. This is something which we have been saying for a long time. The government had also said the same thing and it has been reiterated in the US by the finance minister.

But let us keep the rhetoric aside. The government will perhaps have to do a lot more than keeping on the rhetoric. Do you essentially hope for a rollback? What is the industry looking at? It is one thing to raise this issue but that many people believe it is mere rhetoric.

This step has already been part of the appropriations bill but we know that this may not be the end of it. Other legislations are also being tabled. There are different groups calling for different kinds of action and there is perhaps no end to these kind of measures which are being contemplated by different groups of people. What we are saying is this is very much a part of the trade and you cannot keep imposing all kinds of costs and barriers to trade in areas that are important to the Indian economy. On the other hand, they expect that restrictions or perceived restrictions on trade in India will be lowered or removed or at least not raised. So once both the countries have agreed to raise the trade to $500 billion in a few years, once both countries have agreed that the potential exists and in in the best interest of the two economies, the goal is not going to be reached by raising barriers in areas that are important to each other. I think that is the broader message. One should not only look at it from the point of view of rolling back this particular initiative but work towards bringing out the larger trajectory which has to be adopted for the growth to really take place.

I agree with some of what you have said because nothing else explains the fact that companies almost seem to have shrugged off this hike. If you go by the record number of H-1B visa applications this year, it belies the fact that the companies were at all concerned about that hike.

These two cannot be correlated because this is not a situation where you can get a balance by a pricing solution because the need arises not because the cost of visa is cheap, the need arises because the skills are not available in the US. And if skills are not available in the US, then they will have to come from somewhere outside US and ultimately those costs are borne by the American consumers or the American companies. On the other hand, if these skills are not made available, then ultimately the gains that result in productivity gains in corporate America will not happen and that will adversely impact the companies there. This is something which not only Nasscom or the Indian industry or the finance minister or the government has been pointing out, but US business chambers have also said. They have said that this attempt to demonise H-IB visas and put up this front that there is no shortage of any kind and we do not need anybody coming in on H-1B visas is not in the interest of corporate America itself. This is something which even the US Chamber of Commerce, US-India Business Council and other US business bodies have said.

You said the US chamber is throwing its weight behind Indian IT. What about our own IT doyens? We had NR Narayana Murthy a while back saying Indian IT companies are acting like agents of immigration. Does that not hurt your case even further?

Well you know an individual opinion does not become the opinion of the industry, notwithstanding the fact that it comes from a respected leader of the Indian industry but the fact of the matter is that the industry as a whole does not believe that is the case. I think we are very clear that the industry delivers a huge value to corporate America which helps them keep globally competitive. It also helps corporate America to be the job creator in the US that it is today and that is what has kept the whole job market going. So it is incorrect to look at it from the narrower prism of saying okay, if so many people are coming in on H1-B visas then there are so many jobs lost. This number is miniscule, it is only approximately about 65,000 in all of which the Indian visa holders are only a part. The number of jobs lost in corporate America each year is 1.5 million and surely these 65,000 are inconsequential and negligible when viewed against that number? But the fact is that that number does not hurt America because 1.7 million jobs gets created.

Your argument, notwithstanding those numbers, of course justify your case but the fact is that as elections near and as the political rhetoric picks up, do you expect this backlash against outsourcing against IT companies to pick up even more in the US?

Well you know many of the very substantive measures that are being advocated by some extreme views actually require legislative action and we believe that in the run up to the US election, it is difficult to envisage comprehensive immigration legislation going through in the US. But notwithstanding the fact that comprehensive immigration legislation appears difficult, this kind of stray measures which are not part of any immigration bill as such but which are introduced as collateral with some other bill are things that we will have to continue to watch out for. So we will certainly have to keep putting across this point of view and both from the government and the industry, we continue to do that. We are glad that the government has also put it across so strongly and I think it is good that the finance minister has used this opportunity to state our position unambiguously.

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